BUT WAIT...There's One More

All right!  Last post, second funny moment story.

I was chilling with some friends.  We had no idea what we really wanted to do so we ended up going to Wal-Mart, for the heck of it.  After all, anything is fun if you’re with fun people.

So there we were, in Wal-Mart walking around for no reason whatsoever.  And when you do that in Wal-Mart, well you’re bound to pick up some Mountain Dew and maybe a few donuts to boot.  We decided to dispense with the “we don’t really need this stuff” phase and just buy the goods.  Once the goods were bought we went back to the car—there were only four of us so we all fit in one—and piled in.  Then we debated for a while about where to go next. 

We eventually decided that, even with the donuts, we were hungry, and as I was the one driving I directed our path to the nearest Applebee’s.  It being late at night and all of us being rather high on caffeine, I punched the accelerator as I entered the parking lot, roaring down the somewhat straight stretch.  Then this dude walks out right in front of me.  I have no idea where he came from or how he got there but he was there and I hit him, dead on, at a fairly high speed.  He bounced off the bumper, hit the windshield, and thumped onto the roof before hitting the ground.

I slammed on the brakes, screeching to a halt, and we all sat in silence for at least thirty seconds.  Then, and I know how horrible this sounds, I started to laugh.  I have no idea why.  I mean, I just hit a dude with my car, and for some reason it struck me as hilarious, and as I began to laugh, everyone else did too. It was like our moral compasses had been temporarily turned off so that we could laugh at the fact that I possibly killed a guy.  We weren’t even in the laughter phase of shock or anything, this was genuine laughter and we even started imitating how the guy looked when he bounced off the bumper, which made us laugh even harder.

As I think back on it now, I have no idea how we found any humor in the situation.  Yeah, everyone laughs at the fail videos when people get hit in the crotch, head, stomach, or pretty much any part of their bodies, but that’s watching it from a distance.  It doesn’t matter there because we don’t know the people.  But come on, that’s not supposed to mean that we laugh at serious things like potentially killing a guy.  Yet that’s what we did.  Even as we got out of the car to go check the dude we were still laughing.  Seeing his body sprawled out all crooked on the pavement sobered us up, but there were still a few chuckles going around.  

Those died completely, though, when I checked his pulse and told my friends to call an ambulance.

Now as I hope you were able to tell, the story above is entirely fictitious.  If you were not able to tell, I apologize for any undue trauma I may have caused you.  It’s just that when I got to these blog posts, I was having trouble knowing what to write.  Not because I haven’t been laughing with my friends, because I have been laughing plenty.  But I haven’t had one of those gut wrenching, laughing so hard I’m crying incidents in quite a while, and it’s kind of depressing.  So I made something up. 

Although, thinking about it, if this type of thing did ever happen to me, late at night when I’m with my friends, I honestly think my first reaction would be laughter.

Oh Wait...

What’s that?  You thought I was finished?  Done?  Gone from your life forever?

Well sorry to disappoint, cause I’m back.  As you have no doubted deduced by the fact that you are reading this. 

Why am I back though?  Why would anyone wish to come back to this desolate place?  It’s not by choice, believe me.  I would much rather be kicking back, sipping SunnyD and slaying monsters on my Nintendo DS.  Sounds awesome, right?  Instead, though, I get to write you this post.  All about an incident that will be completely boring to you.  Because this is the post where I deal with an instance in which my friends and I collapse in helpless gales of laughter.  Wait, you might say, that sounds somewhat entertaining.  

Did you know that Neil Armstrong used to make lame jokes about the moon and then sigh and say “I guess you had to be there?”

The above is an example of a joke made funny through the value of pain and truth.  The pain is that no one gets the joke while the truth is that in many such cases you really do have to be there to understand.  Such, I believe, is the case for most, if not all, of such stories as the one I’m about to tell.  It is funny to me, it is funny to my friends, to you I anticipate, at most, slightly amusing.

Now, having set it up so that you are dreading the coming tale (or eagerly anticipating it, depending on how you take things) I shall begin. 

For it to make sense, I have to begin the day before the incident.  It was Thanksgiving, dinner was cooking and football was on.  My older brother vacated his spot on the couch to grab a snack and I walked in and took his place. As you can no doubt imagine, this sparked a wrestling match in which there was much grunting, head locking, and arm twisting.  This lasted for some time and was ended when the Cowboys made a touchdown.

Approximately thirty minutes after, and this is the important part, I lost my voice.  Poof gone.  That was surprising, for I was not sick in any way.  After making completely sure that I was not sick I came to the conclusion that somewhere in the wrestling match something had happened to kill my voice, at which point I simply hoped that it was not permanent (spoiler, it wasn’t). 

Anyway, after that we had a wonderful Thanksgiving and blah blah blah.  The next day is when the incident actually occurred.  As you know, the day after Thanksgiving is known as Black Friday.  So on Friday one of my friends—who was coming over that night—called and said he was going to Wal-Mart with some buddies because they could and wanted to know if I wanted to come.  Obviously I said yes.  The annoying part was that my voice was not nothing more than a whisper, something I had to explain to my friend, and then again to his friends (and every single person I met after that).

It’s late and we’re in Wal-Mart.  I’m with everyone and they all want to go one way while I want to go the other so I just start walking the way I wanna go.  My friend shouts after me, asking where I’m going and so I turn around and tell him.  In my whisper of a voice.  From twenty feet away.  That produced a chorus of “what did he say?” And that made me laugh, although with the rest of them.  It wasn’t a gut-wrenching, can’t breathe, about to die type of laugh.  It was a quiet chuckle that stuck around for the rest of the evening and still comes to me now as I think back on it.  It was one of those laughs that never goes away and you don’t forget, not because anything was particularly funny, simply because it happened when it happened where it happened.

That night we did plenty of other interesting things, among which was a Chinese fire drill, a three liter diet coke mixed with Mementos, and much Mountain Dew.  But it was that one incident that I will remember, retell, and laugh.

Well that and the Chinese fire drill.